Artem, Bryce and I ran the Urbanathlon in NYC this past weekend. It was pretty great.

We drove down to Artem's house in New Jersey, dropped some stuff off, and then took a train to NYC. We got to the gym to pick up our registration packets at 7:40, and saw Jessie/Hardcoretraceur, X, and M1l3s there. We hung out outside the gym for a while, then split ways and headed towards Artem's grandparents house in Brooklyn.

All I can say is: Goddamn can Russians cook. And goddamn DO Russians cook. We must have eaten two or three meals in the... 2 hours we were there and not sleeping.

Got to sleep at 11:30, then woke up at 3:30 to hop on the train to Manhattan. We all got to our places with varying degrees of fail (Artem took the express train by accident, the train I needed was closed so I had to walk, Bryce missed one of his trains), and then the race began! Artem ran the first leg of the race, and did quite well, running a 22 minute 5k, including the time it took to pass the obstacles (Jersey barriers, climbing through tubes). He passed me the timing chip, and I took off. Passed my obstacles with absolutely no difficulty. I was actually a little bit disappointed in how easy they were (Scaffolding maze, Marine hurdles). I passed off to Bryce, who took off up the 52 flights of stairs in World Trade Center Building 7. He completed those in 13 minutes. Absolutely amazing. We actually missed him on the way down, because we didn't expect him to do them that quickly.

We all met up again at the finish line, where Jessie and I took to playing with the taxis hurdles and the 8ft wall climb. We got a nice shot of us simultaneously konging the taxis (I actually slipped and had to roll on the concrete, which worked out well), and then we flew over the wall, much to the surprise of the marines milling about.

Afterwards, the six of us met up with Pyro and Exo, and we went to central park to play Ultimate Frisbee. Then our team went back to NJ, ate about thirty pounds of Russian food, and then passed out.

It was a great weekend. Next year, we're running it all solo. And actually training for it a lot more (broken bones are not conducive to training).

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Artem, Charlie and I travelled down to Philadelphia this past weekend for a jam at Drexel University. It was quite awesome. Pretty good turnout, had people from NYC/NJ, Rochester, Buffalo, Philly, and even Baltimore, MD.

We got to Philly at about 2AM on Saturday morning, and promptly went to sleep. We woke up at 8:30 to meet the rest of the tracuers coming in and we started jamming! We began at 30th Street Station doing some precisions on Jersey Barriers until the K9 unit showed up... After that we met up with M1l3s from NYPK - he was running 10 miles for the Step Up to Fight Diabetes charity event. Then it was a full day of walking, from Drexel's campus, to Temple, UPenn, Central City/City Hall, Philadelphia Museum of Art (where the stair scene from Rocky was filmed), and more. Saturday night, people headed back to Drexel to go to sleep, except for Jessie, Pyro, Blaarg and I. We decided to try and train all night long. We may not have ended up training all night, but we were out in Philly all night, and it was really awesome. We did SO much walking and we were exhausted, but spending the entire night in a foreign city is definitely a cool experience.

Sunday was spent doing a little bit more training at the Museum, where we had three or four groups of people come up to us and ask us what we were doing. We demonstrated, and taught, some pretty basic precisions, and then we got our pictures taken. After that, we were all very tired, and we started the 6 hour drive back home.

Thanks to everyone for making this an awesome Jam!

In other news, I'm in the middle of reorganizing all of my pictures and videos. Here's a new link to a (probably) temporary Picasa page with two albums (one for pictures, one for videos). Most are fairly new (a lot are from Philly infact, so if you want to see some of the pictures and videos from there, check it out!). Hopefully more will be added soon!

Today's story is dedicated to my good friend Austin. I moved from Boston to Austin my freshman year of high school and of course had no friends here. On the very first day I made friends with the people who remain my best friends to this day, and I consider that to be perhaps the most fortunate event of my life.

One of those friends is Austin. Now in the military flying whirly-copters, he used to be the one guy (well, actually I could pretty much always count on Terry too) who would always be in for a crazy plan.